The proposed research project is (a) to apply and evaluate recent findings in individual and group aural rehabilitative methods and materials to the study of persons with profound postlingual hearing impairment; (b) to develop and evaluate new methods and materials for the same group. The major study will compare the communicative skills of persons who have received a multichannel cochlear implant with the skills of the profoundly impaired who wear a hearing aid. Other interwoven studies explore (a) an approach to lipreading instruction that is based on an observed compensatory relationship between auditory and visual recognition of consonants, (b) the application of programmed instruction to phoneme, word, and sentence recognition, (c) the question whether sentences are better learned through the combined auditory and visual modalities or through the auditory modality only, (d) the success with which those with profound hearing impairment can learn to attach meaning to a continuously repeated message that is at first unintelligible to them, and (e) the application of the tracking technique to aural rehabilitation. Findings on a Hearing Performance Inventory and the MMPI scale also promise more information on this group of patients.